page_title: Beat (music)
section_title: On-beat and off-beat
hierarchical_section_title: Beat (music) / On-beat and off-beat
caption_attribution_description: English: Backbeat pattern on snare drum. Created in Sibelius.
context_page_description: In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse, of the mensural level. The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a piece of music, or the numbers a musician counts while performing, though in practice this may be technically incorrect. In popular use, beat can refer to a variety of related concepts, including pulse, tempo, meter, specific rhythms, and groove.
  Rhythm in music is characterized by a repeating sequence of stressed and unstressed beats and divided into bars organized by time signature and tempo indications.
  Beats are related to and distinguished from pulse, rhythm, and meter:
  Meter is the measurement of the number of pulses between more or less regularly recurring accents. Therefore, in order for meter to exist, some of the pulses in a series must be accented—marked for consciousness—relative to others. When pulses are thus counted within a metric context, they are referred to as beats.
  — Leonard B. Meyer and Cooper
  Metric levels faster than the beat level are division levels, and slower levels are multiple levels. Beat has always been an important part of music.
context_section_description: In typical Western music  time, counted as "1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4...", the first beat of the bar (downbeat) is usually the strongest accent in the melody and the likeliest place for a chord change, the third is the next strongest: these are "on" beats. The second and fourth are weaker—the "off-beats". Subdivisions (like eighth notes) that fall between the pulse beats are even weaker and these, if used frequently in a rhythm, can also make it "off-beat".
  The effect can be easily simulated by evenly and repeatedly counting to four. As a background against which to compare these various rhythms a bass drum strike on the downbeat and a constant eighth note subdivision on ride cymbal have been added, which would be counted as follows (bold denotes a stressed beat):
  1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4  —play eighth notes and bass drum alone 
  1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4—the stress here on the "on" beat play  But one may syncopate that pattern and alternately stress the odd and even beats, respectively:
  1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 —the stress is on the "unexpected" or syncopated beat play 
  So "off-beat" is a musical term, commonly applied to syncopation that emphasizes the weak even beats of a bar, as opposed to the usual on-beat. This is a fundamental technique of African polyrhythm that transferred to popular western music. According to Grove Music, the "Offbeat is [often] where the downbeat is replaced by a rest or is tied over from the preceding bar". The downbeat can never be the off-beat because it is the strongest beat in  time. Certain genres tend to emphasize the off-beat, where this is a defining characteristic of rock'n'roll and ska music.
caption: Off-beat or backbeat pattern, popular on snare drum[7] About this soundplay (help·info)
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